Orientals must surely revel in contrasts.  There is no tumult like the tumult in certain of their market-places.  There is no peace like the peace in certain of their mosques.  Even without the slippers carefully tied over your boots you would walk softly, gingerly, in the mosque of El Movayad, the mosque of the columns and the garden.  For once within the door you have taken wings and flown from the city, you are in a haven where the most delicious calm seems floating like an atmosphere.  Through a lofty colonnade you come into the mosque, and find yourself beneath a magnificently ornamental wooden roof, the general effect of which is of deep brown and gold, though there are deftly introduced many touches of very fine red and strong, luminous blue.  The walls are covered with gold and superb marbles, and there are many quotations from the Koran in Arab lettering heavy with gold.  The great doors are of chiseled bronze and of wood.  In the distance is a sultan’s tomb, surmounted by a high and beautiful cupola, and pierced with windows of jeweled glass.  But the attraction of this place of prayer comes less from its magnificence, from the shining of its gold, and the gleaming of its many-colored marbles, than from its spaciousness, its airiness, its still seclusion, and its garden.  Mohammedans love fountains and shady places, as can surely love them only those who carry in their minds a remembrance of the desert.  They love to have flowers blowing beside them while they pray.  And with the immensely high and crenelated walls of this mosque long ago they set a fountain of pure white marble, covered it with a shelter of limestone, and planted trees and flowers about it.  There beneath palms and tall eucalyptus-trees even on this misty day of the winter, roses were blooming, pinks scented the air, and great red flowers, that looked like emblems of passion, stared upward almost fiercely, as if searching for the sun.  As I stood there among the worshippers in the wide colonnade, near the exquisitely carved pulpit in the shadow of which an old man who looked like Abraham was swaying to and fro and whispering his prayers, I thought of Omar Khayyam and how he would have loved this garden.  But instead of water from the white marble fountain, he would have desired a cup of wine to drink beneath the boughs of the sheltering trees.  And he could not have joined without doubt or fear in the fervent devotions of the undoubting men, who came here to steep their wills in the great will that flowed about them like the ocean about little islets of the sea.

From the “Red Mosque” I went to the great mosque of El-Azhar, to the wonderful mosque of Sultan Hassan, which unfortunately was being repaired and could not be properly seen, though the examination of the old portal covered with silver, gold, and brass, the general color-effect of which is a delicious dull green, repaid me for my visit, and to the exquisitely graceful tomb-mosque of Kait Bey, which is beyond